This article discusses, from my own perspective, political
methodology at the age of twenty five years. In particular, I look at
the relationship of political methodology to other methodological
subdisciplines and to statistics, focussing on the division of labor
among the various methodological disciplines. I also briefly discuss
some issues in data collection.

Do academic publication standards reflect or determine research results? The article proposes minimal criteria for distinguishing useful ‘unpublishable’ results from low-quality research, and argues that the virtues of negative results have been overlooked. We consider the fate these results have suffered thus far, review arguments for and against their publication, and introduce a new initiative—a journal to disseminate negative results and advance debate on their recognition and use.

I report the results of a verification of Hawkesworth's 2003 "Congressional Enactments of Race-Gender" (CERG). This is a landmark analysis of race and gender in the U.S. Congress that is noteworthy for both its theory and its empirical evidence. A deeper look at the evidence and the context raises fundamental questions about the empirical validity of CERG's theory of race-gender in Congress. I conclude that racing-gendering in Congress is more nuanced than originally presented in CERG, and that further research is necessary to demonstrate empirically CERG's theory of Congress as a raced-gendered institution. This verification has important methodology implications, as it demonstrates why verification of empirical research -- including interpretive research -- should be a widely-practiced methodology within political science.

There is a particular situation involving the NF that has been noticeably neglected to date in France: the capture live of the motivations and actions of these new partisans who rallied to the movement during the last three years (Glenn, 2005: 35-43). We must also recognize that enabling us to understand this party in "campaigning mode," there is insufficient knowledge. Nonetheless, if we hope to remedy these basic two weaknesses, what methods could researchers employ? Consequently, what can political science methodology eventually learn from an adjustment in the status of the researcher on the ground and at the time of the inquiry? More precisely: what advantages do participant observation employed almost daily offer? What are the basic contributions of total immersion in the "Frontist" environment?
Given these questions, we wanted, based on comparative qualitative research, to explain what fund the validity of the results obtained (Kent, 2001), through establishing a cost-benefit analysis of the use of two different methods, of two inherently quite distinct presentations. Indeed, the result very rarely mentions the researcher's many ups and downs. However, the successes and inevitable failures of the ethnographic investigation condition the nature of the data collected. Therefore, this is an attempt to address several methodological deficiencies or silences, and to reverse certain epistemological biases, through returning to concepts whose substance needs clarification: "participant observation," "empathy," "total immersion," and "infiltration." All the underpinnings of the research do, however, draw attention to the manner in which the political analyst created his methodology and analytical categories, as well as his own approach to the subject under study. As a result, at first we will emphasize the difference in scale between our two research fields, since it led to our adoption of another approach to the subject (I).
Thus, we first chose as our research location the North Flanders Federation from June 2006 to the start of November 2007, the beginning of the presidential campaign, up to the presentation of the assessment of the local councillors. Still, from the month of June 2007, and without abandoning our initial site, we progressively accorded increasing attention to the "new partisans" supporting Marine Le Pen and Steeve Briois in the 14th constituency of Pas-de-Calais, in particular in the city of Henin-Beaumont. In the first week of December 2007, this led us to commence our exploration of the diversity of actors of the General Headquarters of the "Henin-Beaumont pour Vous" list campaign. Henin-Beaumont belongs to the Federation of Mayors of Mid-Sized Cities. Well, to date, no study on the NF has been interested in its "propaganda" strategy (Kalinowski, 2005) for a mid-sized city and during an election campaign, even less for a municipal. The idea was to slide, over a period of several weeks from Flanders to Pas-de-Calais, from the status of participant observer outside of the group, to that of active member at the periphery of the central group, thus, integrated in the group (Strauss, Corbin, and Soulet, 2004). This process offered the researcher the opportunity to situate himself somewhere between simply "taking part" and being "uncovered." Thus, the necessity of reacting, at the spur of the moment, when confronted with the unexpected (II), was the most challenging aspect. Moreover, it is this absence, of a recent localized investigation through direct observation over an extended period, of a political enterprise still provoking concerns and anathemas that propelled us to study what the FN electoral campaigns do to the researcher and his analytical tools.

This narrative recounts the beginning and early years of the Society for Political Methodology and what an initially small group of young, naive and energetic scholars did to and for Political Science.

Nationalism is widely viewed as a force for interstate violence, but does it really have an important effect on state aggression that cannot be explained by strategic concerns? I provide strong evidence that it does using regression discontinuity analysis. I take advantage of the fact that many countries experience a surge of nationalism when they go to the World Cup, and the World Cup qualification process from 1958-1998 produced a large number of countries that barely qualified or barely missed. I show that these countries are well-balanced across a wide range of factors, including past levels of aggression. However, the qualifiers experienced a significant spike in aggression during the World Cup year. I also replicate the analysis using the FIFA regional soccer championships and find similar results. In both cases, the estimated treatment effect is larger for authoritarian states than democracies, suggesting that democratic norms may help constrain nationalistic aggression.

Inferring causal relationships from cross national data poses inherent difficultiesâ€”an unsolvable problem. But the staple method of multiple regression obscures as much as it illuminates. We can do better with the data we have to generate more reliable statistical findings. This poster examines how game theory, simple data inspection, and case studies can provide additional support for well-substantiated arguments and expose concerns with problematic regression results. I draw examples from my substantive research focused mainly on civil wars and authoritarian regimes. Thus, this poster also summarizes methodological themes from my dissertation.